Turning the Head of Christ

A feature story in last Sunday’s Dallas Morning News brought back a flood of nostalgic memories. The article was about the famous painting of Jesus by a graphic designer named Warner Sallman in 1940.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. It was ubiquitous in the second half of the twentieth century; I remember it hanging a number of places in family members’ homes, as well as a few churches I visited. It’s a … shall we say, “pretty picture” of Jesus.

Jesus has flowing brown hair, a full beard, and blue eyes gazing off into the distance. His lips are slightly pursed, as if he’s about to say something calm and soothing.

The article speaks of the picture’s enormous popularity and quotes Billy Graham as saying about the work that it was “probably more satisfying to Americans than the more ancient conceptions which portrayed Christ as weak and emaciated.”

If by “weak and emaciated” Graham meant non-white, then he would have been spot on. Because this famous painting is nothing like the historical Jesus, of that we can be sure. The real Jesus was born in Palestine and was certainly darker than the famous picture, no matter that Sallman claims that he was inspired by a dream in which he saw Jesus.

Since we don’t have a clue as to what Jesus really looked like, the truth is that any drawing, painting, or sketch of Jesus tells us more about the artist and the person viewing the art than it does about Jesus.

Thus, this artwork and its subsequent popularity tells us a great deal about 20th-century American Protestant Christianity and all that was right — and wrong — about it. Sallman’s Jesus is a docile, submissive, and entirely-too-nice Savior of the World. He would have likely made a very good church member in 1950s Methodist churches. He might have even been a very good Methodist pastor, except for that long hair. The long hair is Sallman’s only acquiescence to Jesus’ essential strangeness. But the rest of this Jesus is entirely domesticated. This Jesus would never have turned over the tables of moneychangers, or challenged the High Priest, or told Peter to “Get behind me, Satan!”

It’s hard to imagine Sallman’s Jesus making too much of a fuss. Instead, he appears as a very loving, personable figure. And that is entirely in keeping with the Christianity of the time; Jesus was consistently preached as a sentimental figure who loved children and animals and would ultimately lay down his life so that those who believe in him would have their sins forgiven and live in heaven with him. This was the version of Christianity that was especially popular in white America at the time.

This was the Jesus that Americans wanted to believe in, and the fact that this Jesus was a Scandanavian-looking white dude made the whole idea palatable to the white church.

However, Sallman’s picture overlooks a vital aspect of the historical Jesus. The man from Nazareth spoke and acted in the tradition of the great Hebrew prophets, the rough-edged proclaimers of justice in the face of the world’s illegitimate powers.

In the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the subsequent anti-war drift, Protestant Christianity began to fracture between those who continued to think of Jesus in terms of Sallman’s vision and those who … didn’t.

I would argue that Sallman’s picture is sadly dated and largely irrelevant to our world. Not because Jesus’ hair is out of style, or that he is simply too white. But because what the world needs now is not a sanitized, BFF Jesus and pie-in-the-sky Christianity.

What the world needs now is more of the prophet Jesus who would be angry that children are being torn from their parents after fleeing from war-torn homes, who would be incredulous that children don’t have enough to eat in our cities, who would be outraged that we spend so much money on frivolous leisures, dangerous habits, and military hardware.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus wasn’t a loving figure, nor am I saying that we don’t find forgiveness of sins in him. I believe in life after death, too. These are all part of the Christian faith. However, they aren’t the total picture of the faith.

If we are to have a balanced faith, then we have to come to terms with Jesus the prophet, Jesus the troublemaker, Jesus the justice-seeker.

And a picture like that might not be very pretty.

Other U2 Songs You Should Know

On Sunday, I had the joy of talking about my favorite song of all time, U2’s 1987 hit, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and how it relates to I John 3:2. But it’s certainly not the only song by the band that touches upon faith matters. In fact, here’s a (too) short list of some other U2 songs that are worth listening to and reflecting upon:

“Gloria”: U2’s second album, “October,” released in 1981, is the band’s most overt evangelical Christian album. The biggest hit on the album was “Gloria,” which is not about a woman named Gloria, but rather a song of praise in Latin. In the chorus, Bono sings, “Gloria / In te domine / Gloria / Exultate / Oh, Lord, if I had anything, anything at all / I’d give it to you.”

“40”: The last song on the 1983 album, “War,” is simply Psalm 40 put to music, with the haunting refrain,“How long to sing this song?” This song became the tune that U2 closed most of its concerts with for many years, typically by leaving the stage one at a time until only drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. was left, keeping the rhythm. On the live album, “Under a Blood Red Sky,” when Mullen departs, the crowd continues to sing the plaintive refrain until finally fading to silence.

“Drowning Man”: Also appearing on the album, “War,” this song sounds like something the Psalmist would have written. If I were drowning in the ocean, these are the words and tune I’d want to have in my ears: “Hold on, and hold on tightly / Rise up, rise up with wings like eagles / You run, you run / You run and not grow weary.”

“Grace”: This beautiful song is found on 2000’s comeback album, “All That You Can’t Leave Behind.” These lines are priceless: “What once was hurt / What once was friction / What left a mark / No longer stings / Because Grace makes beauty / Out of ugly things.”

“Yahweh”: On 2004’s “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb,” this closing song acts as a kind of one-word answer to the question posed by the album title. It’s also a prayer to Yahweh (the Hebrew name for God), who is asked to “Take this soul / Stranded in some skin and bones … And make it sing.”

“13 (There Is a Light)”: Last December, U2 released “Songs of Experience,” a kind of companion album to “Songs of Innocence,” which came out in 2014. The band meant to release this album earlier, but Bono had a serious motorcycle accident, as well as another separate health scare. These two events put him in a melancholy mood, reexamining his mortality and relationship with God. He wrote brand-new songs for the album, and the result is a  God-drenched collection of songs. The last song is “13” (literally the 13th track on the album), and contains a hard-earned hope and trust: “There is a light you can’t always see / If there is a world we can’t always be / If there is a dark that we shouldn’t doubt / And there is a light don’t let it go out.” Light is a major theme on the album, and Bono sounds like John the Gospel-writer as he urges the listener to believe that the light will not be overcome by the darkness: “I know the world is dumb / But you don’t have to be / I’ve got a question for the child in you before it leaves / Are you tough enough to be kind?  Do you know your heart has it’s own mind? / Darkness gathers around the light / Hold on, hold on.”

Truth be told, every single one of U2’s songs are informed by a deep, questioning, challenging faith. In case you’re interested in exploring some of these songs, I’ve put together an Apple playlist here.

Would Jesus Get a Flu Shot?

If every silly thing an evangelist said became news, we’d have 24/7 coverage of preachers, and the late night hosts would never run short of jokes.

Gloria Copeland is the latest preacher to have been caught in a ridiculous string of sayings. What made her claims newsworthy apparently is the fact that she and her husband, Kenneth, are part of the president’s evangelical advisory board. Here’s what she said in a Facebook video this past week:

We’ve got a duck season, a deer season, but we don’t have a flu season. And don’t receive it when somebody threatens you with, ‘Everybody’s getting the flu.’ We’ve already had our shot … Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of flu. And we receive it and we take it, and we are healed by his stripes. Amen? You know the Bible says he himself bore our sicknesses and carried our diseases and by his stripes we were healed. When we were healed, we are healed, so get on the word, stay on the word …  Just keep saying that, ‘I’ll never have the flu. I’ll never have the flu.’ Put words -- inoculate yourself with the word of God.

Believe it or not, these comments don’t sound insane to me, like they might to you. Because I understand the underlying theology. I was raised in a church that shared the beliefs of Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. They aren’t typical “evangelicals,” though they share common political viewpoints.

The Copelands are part of the Word of Faith movement, born out of the ministry of E. W. Kenyon, and popularized by Kenneth Hagin, who built a church ministry and Bible college in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The Christianity espoused by Hagin and his followers, including the Copelands, Creflo Dollar, and Charles Capps, to name a few, represents a subset of Pentecostalism, which incorporates elements of the “prosperity gospel,” along with an embrace of faith healing and positive thinking.

Word of Faith Christians believe that, besides the experience of salvation, in which a person repents of her sins, is forgiven, and is “born again,” there is a second experience available to us:“the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.” This occurs when the Spirit fills a person, and enables her to speak in other tongues, as happened in Acts 2. The technical term for these other tongues is “glossalia,” and is best described as an ecstatic babbling. Those who participate in such babbling believe they are speaking in a heavenly language, known only to God. At times, someone is given the ability to “interpret” this heavenly language, and so speak the message in English to those around.

Along with the tongues comes other benefits: people who are empowered by the Spirit are supposedly given the ability to gain wealth and prosper, as well as remain healthy throughout their lives.

Gloria quotes a passage from Isaiah 53 in her justification of believing that Christians don’t need to get the flu. The passage is known as one of the Suffering Servant songs, because it contains a lengthy description of a servant who suffers on behalf of Israel’s deliverance, and whom Christians believe is a prophecy of Jesus Christ.

The passage in question reads like this:

He was despised and avoided by others;     
    a man who suffered, who knew sickness well.
Like someone from whom people hid their faces,     
    he was despised, and we didn’t think about him.
It was certainly our sickness that he carried,
    and our sufferings that he bore,
    but we thought him afflicted,
    struck down by God and tormented.
He was pierced because of our rebellions
    and crushed because of our crimes.     
He bore the punishment that made us whole;
    by his wounds we are healed

(Isaiah 53:3-5, Common English Bible)
 

The last verse is the one which charismatics have seized upon. In other translations, the line reads, “By his stripes we are healed,” which they believe refer to the stripes on Jesus’ back after he was whipped. They take the word “healed” to be a literal reference to one’s health. Thus, if this is a prediction of what the Messiah is going to do in the future, then they reason that those wounds or stripes are meant for our healing in the here and now. All we need to do to be healed is to “name it and claim it.”

As soon as I left home, I left Word of Faith Christianity behind, believing it to be not only irrational, but dangerous and heretical. Their message goes over quite well in middle-class North America, but it falls like a thud in the Global South, in poor neighborhoods, and in war-torn countries.

Jesus didn’t come to earth in order to make us wealthy and healthy. He came with much deeper ambitions — to make us good.

We are, in fact, supposed to become like Jesus. Nowhere in Scripture is Jesus portrayed as particularly wealthy or healthy. in fact, I daresay that following in Jesus' footsteps guarantees quite the opposite.

I’ve met plenty of healthy and wealthy people who made me sick to my stomach, who were genuinely despicable people. But at the same time, I’ve known plenty of broke people who were sick in bed, but were filled with God’s shalom to the point that I wanted to be like them.

In the meantime, I’m headed to the pharmacy for my flu shot. Maybe you should, too.